Tasting Methods for Beer Evaluation

Switching gears from enjoying beer to studying beer can be intimidating, especially when it comes to tasting and evaluating beer. There are so many beer styles out there! Where to start? How to start?

There is no one best way to evaluate beer. That’s good news, because it means you can develop an evaluation approach that works for you and fits your tasting goals. In this blog post, I’ll explain two different approaches to evaluating beer.

How Your Brain Builds Expertise

Before we get to tasting methods, let’s first briefly talk about how to build expertise. It may seem like we’re jumping ahead a few steps, but understanding how we develop expertise is foundational to becoming a better beer evaluator. Simply put, we build expertise from experience. The more beers you evaluate, the better you will be at learning to associate specific sets of flavors and characteristics with given beer styles. Those associations, in turn, will help you evaluate future beers.

To demonstrate this, let’s start with a non-beer example. Freshly baked chocolate chip cookies are a nostalgic memory for many of us. Even reading that sentence may have made you imagine the smell and taste of a fresh, warm chocolate chip cookie. When you think of that chocolate chip cookie, you likely think of it as the sum of its parts. That is, the chocolate chip cookie is a singular object, even though it is made up of several components. You likely don’t reminisce about the individual smells of eggs, butter, baking soda, baking powder, white sugar, brown sugar, chocolate chips, vanilla, and flour. That’s because your brain has efficiently combined those smells into one singular object: a chocolate chip cookie.

Then, the next time you smell a cookie, maybe it’s a peanut butter cookie. You can identify that it is a peanut butter cookie in part because your brain can tell that it is not a chocolate chip cookie. Your brain can recognize that some of the component aromas are similar to a chocolate chip cookie, but that other key aromas do not fit your brain’s experience with chocolate chip cookies. Perhaps the aroma of peanut butter also tells you that you are smelling a cookie, but that it is a peanut butter cookie.

Beer works the same way. Being able to evaluate beer well is not an inborn ability. The differences in our genetics mean that we may experience certain aromas differently (or not at all), but there is no specific combination of genetics that predisposes someone to naturally being better at evaluating beer.

The neurons in our brains responsible for communicating information about aroma are plastic, meaning that they change with experience. The more discrimination-type activity you do in your beer evaluations, the more your brain becomes primed to be able to discriminate between subsequent beer styles. That is to say that the more you practice mindfully evaluating one beer style, the better your brain becomes at evaluating and identifying future beer styles.

Approaches To Beer Evaluation

Now that we understand how expertise comes from practice and experience, let’s turn to some evaluation approaches you may take to improve your beer-tasting experience and develop expertise. These approaches fall into two basic categories: top-down evaluation and bottom-up evaluation.

It’s important to begin by identifying what your evaluation goals are. Your goals will change as you study different beer styles, engage in different types of evaluations, and develop your evaluation skills. As mentioned above, there is no one way or right way to evaluate beer. You can mix and match approaches or create your own approach. Even as a Master Cicerone, I do not employ the exact same approach to evaluating beer in every situation because my goals are different.

Here are some examples of what your goals may be:

• Evaluating new-to-you beer styles against style parameters - This is the first Altbier I’ve ever tried. What should I expect?
• Improving the depth and breadth of your descriptive language skills - I want to go beyond describing a beer as “malty,” “hoppy,” or “sour.”
• Assess a beer sample against a known beer style - Is this beer a good example of an Oatmeal Stout?
• Determining a beer style from a list of potential beer styles: Is this beer an English Porter, Munich Dunkel, Belgian Dubbel, or American Porter?
• Categorizing the beer style of an unknown sample: What are the attributes of this sample, and what beer style does it best resemble?

Top-down and bottom-up evaluations are analysis methods. With top-down evaluations, you begin with the big picture and get down to the details. In other words, you start with the general and move to the specific. With bottom-up evaluations, you begin with the specific and build your way to the general. Let’s look at a couple of examples.

Top-Down Approach

Going with our above example, goal of wanting to learn more about Altbier, what might a top-down approach be?

Our first step may be to read about the Altbier style and what the general parameters of the style are, such as the color, aroma, flavor, and mouthfeel. The Cicerone program utilizes the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) beer style guidelines as the reference source for style parameters, so that’s a good place to start to learn more about beer styles.

Our next step will be to evaluate the beer in front of us against the guidelines. There are a few ways to do this, and luckily, there are tools available to assist. The simplest way is to compare the beer’s qualitative properties to the guidelines. Look at the beer - does it seem to fit within the guidelines for appearance? If not, why not? Maybe the color seems too dark or the head isn’t long-lasting. Then smell and taste the beer, carefully comparing your perceptions to the guidelines, noting what is similar and what is different.

If you are new to evaluating beer, this may seem like an intimidating exercise. I recall how uncomfortable my first experience with judging beer in my homebrew club’s competition was. I wasn’t sure what to do, had never heard of the BJCP, and didn’t have a good vocabulary for describing what I was tasting. However, recall from our above discussion that we only gain expertise through experience. We all start somewhere, even Master Cicerones. Your goal as a beer evaluator is to keep practicing and understand that your skills will improve the more you practice. Trust the process!

Two tools that can help guide your top-down evaluations are the BJCP Beer Scoresheet and the Deductive Beer Tasting Method Tasting Grid, developed by Master Cicerone Rich Higgins. Both resources break the components of beer down into the smaller sections of aroma, appearance, flavor, and mouthfeel, making evaluation more manageable and approachable.

Within each section, the BJCP Beer Scoresheet also prompts you to comment on characteristics and sensations relevant to that section. For example, in evaluating the flavor of our Altbier using the BJCP Beer Scoresheet, did you note the malt, hops, and fermentation characteristics? What about the balance and the finish? The scoresheet is a useful top-down resource when your goal may be to learn more about a specific beer style, to compare a sample to the guidelines to determine how well it fits the style, and to improve your descriptive language.

The Deductive Beer Tasting Method (DBTM) Tasting Grid provides even more structure than the BJCP Beer Scoresheet. Each section contains common beer descriptors and also prompts you to identify the intensity of each. Using our Altbier as an example, do you get aromas of grains and bread or aromas of coffee and chocolate? Working through each section of the DBTM Tasting Grid can help you learn the ranges of ingredient profiles possible in every beer style. It is useful in developing your beer lexicon and in tying your theoretical beer style knowledge to what you’re perceiving.

Both of these tools provide a framework and structure that may be helpful to you in your tasting practice. It’s important to note that these are not the only tools out there, and neither one is the‘official Cicerone tasting method’, but each one provides credible guidance as you build your tasting expertise.

Bottom-Up Approach

Let’s say instead we want to learn the nuances between similar styles of beer or even practice identifying the beer style of a completely unknown beer sample. Both of these are examples of when we may want to employ a bottom-up approach. That is to say, we’re going to start with the details and use our evaluation to determine which beer style our unknown sample best fits.

Think of this as removing the training wheels from a bicycle. We’ve been building our expertise with top-down approaches and learning theoretical beer style knowledge. Now, we are ready to use our expertise, experience, and knowledge to essentially “build” the beer style from the sample in front of us.

We begin our bottom-up evaluation by assessing the beer and making notes about what we perceive. Part of the experience you gain from top-down evaluations is learning what aspects you should be evaluating for appearance, aroma, flavor, and mouthfeel. When you first start, you may not remember to note the color of the foam, the finish of the flavor, or the carbonation level. You may not have the context to understand the intensity of certain flavors or be able to describe some aspects of the beer. The more you practice, however, the more you will notice that these details will become ingrained in your evaluation.

Using the bottom-up evaluation, we note every relevant aspect of our unknown beer sample. We gather and accumulate as much information about the sample in front of us as possible. Keep in mind that the absence of a perception is also a perception. For example, noting that you do not detect any phenols in a beer is an important perception, as only certain types of yeast produce phenols, and they are only a typical or acceptable flavor in some beer styles. After we’ve gathered all the information we can about our sample, we then begin to link those pieces of information and relate them to not only our theoretical knowledge about beer styles, but also to our past experiences with beer styles.

Selective Perception And Slowing Down

When we’re evaluating the beer in front of us, it’s important to try not to jump to conclusions about what style it may be until we’ve completed the evaluation. This can be difficult to do, so it’s important to be cognizant of when you may be making up your mind about a style too soon. Deciding a sample is a particular style before you’ve completed your full evaluation can lead to a confirmation bias known as selective perception. Selective perception happens when we fail to notice, quickly forget, or ignore information that falls outside of our expectations.

For example, we may see a beer that is dark brown in color, taste some roastiness, and decide the beer must be an Irish Stout before we’ve fully evaluated and analyzed the sample. When that happens, we’re more likely to ignore or overlook perceptions that don’t align with what we expect in an Irish Stout. Maybe there is considerable hop flavor, or maybe there are some spicy phenols that we completely overlook because we made up our minds too soon.

When it’s time to analyze your perceptions, it can be helpful to look over your list and determine the top aspects of the beer. Another way to think about this is to consider what the main perceptions the beer is shouting at us? Maybe the beer is very dark brown with tan foam, has high coffee and toasty malt aromas and flavors, and has aggressive bitterness.

It is during our analysis that we can begin thinking about which possible styles our unknown sample may fit. I like to make a list of possible beer styles and then reanalyze my notes against each beer style. Using the above example, my list will include beer styles that are dark in color, have high coffee roastiness, and have aggressive bitterness. Let’s say I write down Irish Stout, English Porter, Black IPA, and Imperial Stout.

Now, I’ll look critically at my tasting notes and compare them to each possible beer style I wrote down. In this example, the assertive bitterness I detected rules out Irish Stout (medium to high bitterness) and English Porter (medium-low to medium bitterness). Next, the high coffee roastiness tells me that this sample is probably not a Black IPA, which leaves me with Imperial Stout as the likely style. With Imperial Stout in mind, I look back through my notes to see if my Imperial Stout prediction matches up with what I tasted. If it does, great! If it doesn’t, then I can start the process over and continue my evaluation until I determine the correct beer style.

Each of these approaches is customizable for you and your evaluation goals. I encourage you to practice both top-down and bottom-up evaluations throughout your beer sensory journey. Remember that improving your beer evaluation and description skills is not a linear process. Iterative processes like top-down and bottom-up evaluations are how we identify our strengths as well as opportunities for improvement.